OpenOffice.org’s Market Share at 20%!
Here’s a great post I picked up via the one of the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. It looks as though the 95% market share numbers for M$ Office are way off the mark! In reality, it could be more like 20% of the Office application market is actually OpenOffice.org’s and M$’s position could actually be going backwards!
Wharton’s analysis reveals the fallacy that 95% of users (PC users or office software users, pick one market) use Microsoft Office. Instead, the oft-quoted number simply measures that 95% of the revenue collected for the sale of office suites goes to MS (according to International Data Corp.). Thus, free products including OpenOffice.org and Google Docs are not measured by this statistic at all!
If you measure market share as the number of computers with the software installed, as a percentage of all computers, then Microsoft has far less than 95% and OOo has a good slice: Microsoft claims to have about 400 million MSO users, and some estimates place OOo users at 100 million. With these simple numbers, MS has 80% market share and OpenOffice has 20% (obviously excluding other players and overlap; these numbers could be refined).
Nice one Benjamin. I can’t wait for it to reach 50% – and I believe it will too.
Tags: OpenOffice.org
How do you count people who’ve got both OpenOffice & Office and use Google Docs? Presumably, the stats count an individual machine as having the software installed upon it. With Google Docs that notion goes out of the window somewhat.
Personally I don’t count anyone, but you do raise a good point. The original article is really just about how M$ is continually represented with a 95% market share for Office. And as it turns out, the reason is simply that the “statisticians” are only looking at the money trail… i.e. how much of the sales of Office application software goes to M$.
Obviously, when you consider the numbers of users of free solutions the picture becomes much less one-sided. I’m not sure how much Google Docs would account for today, but I’d expect that to be an increasing share of the overall pie. When you add in the 104m downloads of OOo, plus all the pre-bundled copies that come with distros (my Ubuntu desktop for example), then it is clear that there is significant percentage of non-Microsoft users out there and it is a very rapidly growing one too! M$ piece of that pie must surely be shrinking.
Thanks for the comments – it’s good to know that at least some of the many visitors actually read it 😉
I’m sure plenty do read it, just that for some reason people are a bit shy about commenting. As blogs are supposed to be a conversation, I think that’s a bit odd.
Any chance you could add one of those nice email notification plugins? They do make blog comments into a genuine conversation. 🙂
That’s a good idea. I plan to upgrade the WordPress engine to 2.3 soon anyway so I’ll do it then.
Thanks.